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Nokia's Ovi store is suffering from more teething problems as the site can't seen to keep itself online - though the company claims that users coming in direct from devices aren't experiencing problems.

Ovi is Nokia's answer to Apple's iTunes, offering a broader range of content to a broader range of handsets - or at least it would if it could stay up for more than five minutes and operated at a sensible speed when it was available. Comments from Reg readers would seem to belie the company's assurance that the on-device client is working fine, though we've found it stable if a little sluggish.

In a statement on the Ovi blog the company claims that "extraordinarily high spikes of traffic... resulted in some performance issues", but adds that more servers have now been added to resolve the issue, and that users coming into Ovi from their mobile handsets were unaffected. At the time of writing the Ovi site was back, having gone down at 12.20pm for several minutes, but as this article was being posted the service disappeared again leaving only an apology.

Not quite open for business

Ovi is nothing if not expansive in its ambition; the brand encompasses cloud synchronisation of contacts and diary, media sharing, music and games downloading as well as the application store that's getting all the attention. Music and games were folded into the Ovi brand from Nokia Music and N-Gage respectively, and both those services are still operational while the core of Ovi remains offline.

Teething problems are to be expected, but they must be addressed quickly as users' patience will quickly become exhausted. We're still trying to work out how Ovi compares to the competition and will give you a more comprehensive look at the service tomorrow - assuming it remains stable enough for us to do so. ®